“There wouldn’t be a Single Round Eye in an American University if the System was truly about merit” – An Old Rogue.

 

Thanks to the return of Donald Trump to the White House, getting news pegs for things you rant about has become easier. Donald Trump did not disappoint in that department when over the weekend, Mr. Trump fired the Chairman of the Joint Chief’s of Staff, General CQ Brown, along with other senior military officers, including the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Lisa Franchetti and vice-chief for the air force, General Jim Slife.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyr2xvn4dpo

 

 The moves caught people by surprise but were predictable. The Secretary of Defence, Pete Hegseth had stated that one of his first moves would have been to fire General Brown because he was considered “woke” for having spoken up about the George Floyd murder four years ago.

As mentioned, the Trump administration is on the war path against the “management fad” known as “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” or “DEI.” Federal Government agencies and corporations who were once trying to have lots of DEI programs and now rushing to scale back.

https://www.pgsf.org/diversity-equity-inclusion-dei/

 

 According to the Mr. Hegseth, the firing of the likes of General Brown, the second African-American to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Admiral Franchetti, the first woman to be Chief of Naval Operations, ends the era of “DEI Nonsense” and returns the military to “merit based” promotions and focus on “war fighting.”

On the surface, the end of “woke” and things like “DEI” seems to sound like a common-sense return to old fashioned focus on getting things done. To an extent, this sounds like a relief after years of “cultural wars” over things like trans-rights, pronouns and so on.

However, whilst this may sound like a return to what many of us might consider normal, the truth is that the whole point of DEI is misunderstood and the war against the DEI is likely to do exactly the opposite of what its propagators claim they want to do – restore merit to the system.

Let’s face it, meritocracy is a wonderful ideal. In an ideal world, only the best and brightest would get ahead regardless of ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual orientation. Being “colour-blind” when it comes to doing things is the way things “should be.”

However, the reality is that we don’t live in an ideal world and more often than not, things are not as they should be. If you look at any given society, the people with power like having power and their children tend to grow up thinking that their privilege of starting life in a certain place is a natural right.

Look at it this way, nearly everyone of us grew up understanding that the way to get ahead in life is to go to school, get good grades and then get a good job. However, the truth is that a good portion of us start out in “disadvantaged” circumstances. An ethnically white son of a real estate tycoon in Manhattan who went to University of Pennsylvania starts out from a very different place from a black kid from the Bronx who would be lucky to end up in a school where a metal detector at the door is a necessity. It goes without saying that the first kid is bound to do way better in life than the second, who, in many cases would be considered lucky if he didn’t end up doing a bit of time before his 30^th birthday.

Now, you could say this is not the fault of the first kid for being born into a well to do family (speaking as a kid who grew up well to do). However, you can’t really call it true merit if people only compete with people like themselves. Here in Singapore, we officially have a meritocracy. However, if you glance at the boards of the companies on the SGX, you’ll notice that the same names keep popping up. Why is that so? Are these people simply better than the rest of us? The answer could be yes if you look at the way merit is defined (best education performance etc). However, you need to look closer and you’ll notice that they inevitably came from the same schools, hung out in the right social circles and so on.

The problem we get is that concept of merit gets defined by the people on top. This allows them to choose the concept of merit to keep things within the circle. This allows us to develop “inbreeding.” One only has to glance at portraits of medieval monarchs to understand how damaging inbreeding can be.

So, given that the concept of merit becomes corrupted over time, it actually becomes necessary to have something to ensure that the pool of competing people remains relatively open. Call the concept of DEI a necessary step protecting the system from inbreeding.

This leads to the other point that states that DEI and things like affirmative action are about promoting incompetent minorities at the expense of competent majorities. What affirmative action says is that if all things are equal, the one who happens to have something “disadvantaged” in their background, gets the job. Let’s also remember that affirmative action was about keeping the number of Asians down in American university as much it’s been about promoting blacks and Latinos in the work place. The Old Rogue, when he was alive pointed out that “There wouldn’t be a single round eye in American universities if they were based on merit.”

Now, despite the “noble intentions” of DEI, there are faults in the system. However, one of the great ironies is that the one institution that has truly been “colour blind” in America is the military. This being the one place where the number of black people ordering white people around is sizeable.

As anyone who has been into the military realizes, you end up in situations where you care less about whether the person is black, white or purple as long as they can help you out.

Let’s put it this way, General Brown is only the second “black” man to get the top job in the military. This is a job that’s been around since 1942. Admiral Franchetti is the only woman to run the navy, a job that’s been around since 1909. Nobody has stated that either were put there by anything other than merit (for the record, General Brown got his job as the top man in the air force because Donald Trump put him there). As Nelson DeMille in his book the “General’s Daughter” points out “Blacks and Women in the military have to work harder.”

Let’s look at the fact that General Brown’s presumptive replacement is retired Lieutenant-General Dan Caine, who has a record of being a great fighter pilot but has never held a four-star appointment. Is this a case of a qualified black man being replaced by a less qualified white man?  

Yes, the possibility of DEI getting silly is there. However, as the removal of General Brown and Admiral Franchetti is not about returning the military to merit based promotions and focusing on “war-fighting.”